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DISCUSSION NOTES Comparative Concepts and Descriptive Categories in Crosslinguistic Studies

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DISCUSSION NOTES Comparative Concepts and Descriptive Categories in Crosslinguistic Studies DISCUSSION NOTES Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies MARTIN HASPELMATH Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology In this discussion note, I argue that we need to distinguish carefully between descriptive cate- gories, that is, categories of particular languages, and comparative concepts, which are used for crosslinguistic comparison and are specifically created by typologists for the purposes of compar- ison. Descriptive formal categories cannot be equated across languages because the criteria for category assignment are different from language to language. This old structuralist insight (called CATEGORIAL PARTICULARISM) has recently been emphasized again by several linguists, but the idea that linguists need to identify ‘crosslinguistic categories’ before they can compare languages is still widespread, especially (but not only) in generative linguistics. Instead, what we have to do (and normally do in practice) is to create comparative concepts that allow us to identify compara- ble phenomena across languages and to formulate crosslinguistic generalizations. Comparative concepts have to be universally applicable, so they can only be based on other universally appli- cable concepts: conceptual-semantic concepts, general formal concepts, and other comparative concepts. Comparative concepts are not always purely semantically based concepts, but outside of phonology they usually contain a semantic component. The fact that typologists compare lan- guages in terms of a separate set of concepts that is not taxonomically superordinate to descriptive linguistic categories means that typology and language-particular analysis are more independent of each other than is often thought.* Keywords: language typology, comparative concept, descriptive category, crosslinguistic category 1. INTRODUCTION: HOW TO COMPARE LANGUAGES. The purpose of this discussion note is to argue that crosslinguistic comparison should be based on comparative concepts created by the typologist, rather than on crosslinguistic categories that are instantiated in different languages, and to show how comparative concepts differ from language- specific descriptive categories. Although in practice typologists generally work with such special comparative concepts, this distinction between comparative concepts and descriptive categories has not been articulated clearly before. More commonly, linguists tend to assume that there is a substantial set of universally available CROSSLINGUISTIC CATEGORIES (such as adjective, passive voice, accusative case, future tense, second person, subject, affix, clitic, phrase, WH-movement) from which languages may make a selection (Newmeyer 2007), and which are used both for description/analysis and for comparison. Typological research would then simply con- sist in identifying adjectives, passives, and so on in each language that has the category, and examining the ways in which the properties of the categories vary across languages. In this approach to crosslinguistic comparison, which we can call CATEGORIAL UNIVER- SALISM, it is one of the main tasks of comparative linguists (i.e. typologists) to deter- mine what these crosslinguistic categories are. For linguists working on individual * Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, at the University of Leipzig (during the Leipzig Spring School on Linguistic Diversity), at the Cognitive- Functional Linguistics Conference, University of Tartu (May 2008), and at the Société de Linguistique de Paris (December 2008). I am grateful to the audiences for useful feedback, and to Bob Ladd, Matthew Dryer, Östen Dahl, Edith Moravcsik, Frederick Newmeyer, Geoff Pullum, Gilbert Lazard, Christian Lehmann, Bern- hard Wälchli, Andrew Spencer, David Gil, Esa Itkonen, and Susanne Michaelis for interesting discussions of the points of this paper. A number of referees for Language helped me improve the paper; I am especially grateful to Nick Evans and Greg Carlson. 663 664 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 86, NUMBER 3 (2010) languages, this means that language-particular categories can be expected to be drawn from a relatively small set, that they can be equated with categories of other languages, and that they can be identified with (or instantiate) the crosslinguistic categories. Thus, comparative linguistics is an important necessary prerequisite for analyses of particular languages. Categorial universalism has been uniformly adopted in generative typology since its beginnings, and it appears to be implicitly assumed by many other linguists as well (e.g. Payne 1997, Corbett 2000, Van Valin 2005, Dixon 2010). It is sometimes even assumed that particular categories are universal in the sense not only of being uni- versally available, but also of being universally instantiated (e.g. nouns and verbs in Baker 2003, adjectives in Dixon 2004). The present discussion note starts out from an alternative view of the tasks of com- parative linguistics. Following recent work on the foundations of grammatical typology by various authors (Dryer 1997, Croft 2001, Lazard 2006, Haspelmath 2007, Cristofaro 2009), I assume that grammatical categories are not crosslinguistic entities (either uni- versally available or universally instantiated). Each language has its own categories, and to describe a language, a linguist must create a set of DESCRIPTIVE CATEGORIES for it, and speakers must create mental categories during language acquisition. These cate- gories are often similar across languages, but the similarities and differences between languages cannot be captured by equating categories across languages. It was one of the major insights of structuralist linguistics of the twentieth century (especially the first half) that languages are best described in their own terms (e.g. Boas 1911), rather than in terms of a set of preestablished categories that are assumed to be universal, although in fact they are merely taken from an influential grammatical tradition (e.g. Latin gram- mar, or English grammar, or generative grammar, or ‘basic linguistic theory’). This alternative, nonaprioristic approach to categories can be called CATEGORIAL PARTICULAR- ISM. In this approach, language-particular analyses can be carried out independently of comparative linguistics.1 Categorial particularism appears to make crosslinguistic comparison more challeng- ing, but I argue that there exists a coherent and viable methodology for typological re- search that is compatible with it, which has in fact been employed by most researchers in the Greenbergian tradition (e.g. Greenberg 1963, Mallinson & Blake 1981, Comrie 1989, Dryer 1992, Croft 2003, Haspelmath et al. 2005, Song 2011). This is the use of COMPARATIVE CONCEPTS, that is, concepts specifically designed for the purpose of com- parison that are independent of descriptive categories. However, linguists have often been unclear about the way that the apparent paradox of comparability of incommensu- rable systems can be resolved. It is my goal here to explicate this approach and defend it against challenges from a categorial-universalist perspective such as Newmeyer 2007. I first give an overview of the crucial notion of comparative concept and characterize descriptive categories, showing that they must be different in different languages, and then argue against the use of crosslinguistic categories. The heart of the paper is §5, where I give concrete examples of well-known grammatical comparative concepts and show that the corresponding language-particular categories are crucially different. Fol- lowing this, I address the terminological issues arising from this distinction and review earlier approaches to grammatical comparison, showing that very few earlier authors 1 I use the terms ‘comparative linguistics’ and ‘typology’ interchangeably in this discussion note. ‘Typolo- gy’ is often associated with specifically nongenerative approaches, so I generally prefer the broader (and more transparent) but longer term ‘comparative linguistics’. DISCUSSION NOTES 665 have made this important distinction explicit, even though in practice many linguists distinguish the two notions implicitly. I then ask how comparative concepts are chosen, concluding that no general answer can be given because multiple perspectives of com- parison can be adopted simultaneously without contradiction. Finally, §9 emphasizes that comparative concepts are not simply generalizations over linguistic categories, and that typology cannot be based on the comparison of categories in the sense of struc- turally coherent units of languages. 2. TYPOLOGISTS USE COMPARATIVE CONCEPTS. Typologists have often observed that crosslinguistic comparison of morphosyntactic patterns cannot be based on formal pat- terns (because these are too diverse), but has to be based on universal conceptual- semantic concepts (e.g. Stassen 1985:14, 2011, Croft 1990:11–12, 1995:88, 2003:13–14, Heger 1990/91, Givón 2001:20–23, Song 2001:10–12, Haspelmath 2007). As New- meyer (2007:136) rightly emphasizes, however, ‘typological generalizations need to make reference to the specific form in which these universal concepts are realized as well’ (see also Rijkhoff 2009, 2010). Typologists make generalizations about phenom- ena such as case affixes, gender, adpositions, passive constructions, and relative clauses, and none of these can be defined in purely conceptual-semantic terms. Thus, I claim that what crosslinguistic grammatical research is based on in general
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